There are a number of great EMR (Electronic Medical Record) forums on the web. There really is a lot to choose from and so when you’re tired of reading my EMR blog or when I’m too busy to post everything I’d like to post then you can visit these EMR hideaways:

EMRUpdate.com – Unbiased, Impartial, Independent EMR Information
This is the premier EMR forum on the net. It has the most activity and a wealth of information. I am a little biased since I am a techonology forum moderator on EMR Update. You can find me on the site as “techguy”. This EMR forum really should be enough for you to read for the rest of your life.

Doctor’s Gadget - Electronic Medical Records and Medical PDA Forum
My second favorite EMR forum. This site probably sees as many visitors as EMR Update, but it doesn’t get nearly as many people posting. I like that it doesn’t just talk about EMR, but also talks about medical gadgetry. My brothers are all tech guys, but they have both recognized that I’m the man with the most tech toys. Like the t-shirt says, “He who dies with the most toys….WINS!!” At least it should say that, and that’s also why I love all the technology found at Doctor’s Gadget.

EMR Consultant – EMR Consultant Forum
This is a very nice forum, but for some reason it just hasn’t seen the traffic that it deserves. The EMR Consultant website is well worth the time since it is absolutely free and the forum is a nice read, but not yet comprehensive. I wish it saw more activity, but it hasn’t taken off quite yet. It still has some good information posted.

DocsBoard – Ultimate Discussion for Doctors
I’m not a doctor so supposedly I’m not allowed to post on it. This really doesn’t make sense to restrict people who aren’t doctors. I hear they are really anal about who can participate in their doctor discussion. Sure it makes sense that a Doctor wouldn’t want a tech person’s input on implementing an EMR system. I’m sure they’re EMR and technology experts already. Whatever!! I hear the board is dying with little or no action so maybe this one doesn’t even deserve to be posted here.

Now you can see why I don’t have much time to post here.

It looks more and more like I was right about my post of having a Google Health Portal on January 23. I even mentioned a Google Health Portal a second time on March 28th since I was seeing so many searches being directed to my site for people searching google health. I still think it’s a great idea, but I’m interested to see how dynamic the site really is. How trustworthy can the site be? People link to Paris Hilton a lot and that doesn’t mean that it is worth reading (although she may be worth looking at).

The rumor of Google Health looks pretty promising. I have a feeling the initial offering won’t be much more than what google finance is now. If it is then that’s good for me. I already get a number of people visiting my site from Google Finance so I imagine Google Health could be even more beneficial.

One day at the beginning of the “EMR Experience”, I saw the nurses quite upset and overwhelmed with all the changes and the learning curve of implementing an EMR. You could literally feel the negativity in the air. My wife had supplied my office with a Costco box of candy bars. Seeing the candy bars gave me an idea. I walked through the clinic with the box of candy bars offering them to everyone. It was amazing how a little candy bar could literally change the mood of the entire clinic. Maybe every EMR system should provide a box of candy bars as part of every EMR purchase.

A friend of mine on EMRUpdate recently asked how a SAN applies to EMR. I took so much time to write a response I decided to copy it here. I’m sure I’m missing some details, but this should be a good start.

Really a SAN is basically a bunch of disks that can be connected to a bunch of different servers over fiber optics. You can see more formal definitions at the Wikipedia – Storage Area Networks and Webopedia – Storage Area Networks.

My personal experience with a SAN is that they are fantastic, but they are quite complex to work with. They are getting cheaper and easier to manage(evidenced by a nice SAN product from Apple), but it still takes some work to get it working.

To me the real advantage of a SAN is that it allows you to do clustering. It separates your data from your server making the 2 independent of each other. This makes managing servers very nice(pull out a server and update it with no down time) and backups of the data(you can backup your data to disk and then from disk to tape).

So, why would an EMR want to use a SAN? Quite frankly most won’t want to right now. Purchasing a server with a bunch of hard drives is good enough for most small doctors offices. It could be very beneficial for very large offices that need to maintain 24 x 7 uptime and/or store a whole lot of data. A server these days can only reach about 1.8 Terabytes of data(6-300 gig hard drives). SANS can easily hit 7 Terabytes of data(and plenty more if you have the $$).

Sure, you can hook up a nice scsi shelf to increase the number of drives on a server, but then you get much slower response reading the drive through the scsi connection. Often they use the term “High Availability” when they talk about the speed with which you can access data on a SAN. Besides storage space, the speed with which you can access a large amount of data is what sets SANs apart from just a bunch of drives.

There are some other real nice features with SANS, but these are the main ones in my mind. As they get cheaper and EMR’s databases get bigger I see them becoming a larger part of an EMR system. Until then, no need to worry about SANs with your EMR.

As far as “Why do they call it a “Storage Network” instead of just “storage”?”

I think the terminology “network” is applied because you are connected to the SAN(or storage) using fiber optics and you go through a fiber switch to enable fast access to the drives.